for a worthless guide.  It was impossible to prop a corpse on the corner of Tottenham Court Road without arousing fatal curiosity in the bosoms of the passers-by; as for lowering it down a London chimney, the physical obstacles were insurmountable.  To get it on board a train and drop it out, or on the top of an omnibus and drop it off, were equally out of the question.  To get it on a yacht and drop it overboard, was more conceivable; but for a man of moderate means it seemed extravagant.  The hire of the yacht was in itself a consideration; the subsequent support of the whole crew (which seemed a necessary consequence) was simply not to be thought of.  His uncle and the houseboat here occurred in very luminous colours to his mind.  A musical composer (say, of the name of Jimson) might very well suffer, like Hogarth’s musician before him, from the disturbances of London.  He might very well be pressed for time to finish an opera—­say the comic opera Orange Pekoe—­Orange Pekoe, music by Jimson—­’this young maestro, one of the most promising of our recent English school’—­vigorous entrance of the drums, etc.—­the whole character of Jimson and his music arose in bulk before the mind of Gideon.  What more likely than Jimson’s arrival with a grand piano (say, at Padwick), and his residence in a houseboat alone with the unfinished score of Orange Pekoe?  His subsequent disappearance, leaving nothing behind but an empty piano case, it might be more difficult to account for.  And yet even that was susceptible of explanation.  For, suppose Jimson had gone mad over a fugal passage, and had thereupon destroyed the accomplice of his infamy, and plunged into the welcome river?  What end, on the whole, more probable for a modern musician?

‘By Jove, I’ll do it,’ cried Gideon.  ‘Jimson is the boy!’

CHAPTER XI.  The Maestro Jimson

Mr Edward Hugh Bloomfield having announced his intention to stay in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead, what more probable than that the Maestro Jimson should turn his mind toward Padwick?  Near this pleasant riverside village he remembered to have observed an ancient, weedy houseboat lying moored beside a tuft of willows.  It had stirred in him, in his careless hours, as he pulled down the river under a more familiar name, a certain sense of the romantic; and when the nice contrivance of his story was already complete in his mind, he had come near pulling it all down again, like an ungrateful clock, in order to introduce a chapter in which Richard Skill (who was always being decoyed somewhere) should be decoyed on board that lonely hulk by Lord Bellew and the American desperado Gin Sling.  It was fortunate he had not done so, he reflected, since the hulk was now required for very different purposes.

Jimson, a man of inconspicuous costume, but insinuating manners, had little difficulty in finding the hireling who had charge of the houseboat, and still less in persuading him to resign his care.  The rent was almost nominal, the entry immediate, the key was exchanged against a suitable advance in money, and Jimson returned to town by the afternoon train to see about dispatching his piano.